The US is known as the land of opportunities. America has always nullified the predictions of depleting strength of Superpower status through technological innovations and economic strength. The key to this pre-eminence in global politics is the ability of the US to attract best of the talent from all over the world. These immigrants have played a crucial role in shaping the country of dreams, Carnegie Corporation Report says, many of them are Bharatiyas. Here are few eminent Indian Americans who are figured in that list
Dr Deepak Chopra
Spirituality, Alternative medicine
Dr Deepak Chopra was born on October 22, 1946 in New Delhi. A famous Bharatiya-American author, public speaker, alternative medicine advocate, and a prominent figure in the New Age movement, he has become one of the best-known and successful figures in alternative medicine. Chopra studied medicine in Bharat before emigrating to the US in 1970 where he completed residencies in internal medicine and endocrinology. In 1980, he became chief of staff at the New England Memorial Hospital. He met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1985 and became involved with the Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement. He resigned from his position at NEMH shortly thereafter to establish the Maharishi Ayurveda Health Center. Chopra gained a following in 1993 after his interview on the The Oprah Winfrey Show regarding his books. He then left the TM movement to become the executive director of Sharp Health Care’s Center for Mind-Body Medicine and in 1996 he co-founded the Chopra Center for Wellbeing.
Jhumpa Lahiri
Literature
Author Nilanjana Sudeshna aka Jhumpa Lahiri was born on July 11, 1967 in London. Lahiri's debut short story collection Interpreter of Maladies (1999) won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and her first novel, The Namesake (2003), was adapted into the popular film of the same name. Lahiri is a member of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, appointed by President Barack Obama. Her book The Lowland, published in 2013, was a nominee for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction. Lahiri is a professor of creative writing at Princeton University.
Sri Srinivasan
Law
Padmanabhan Srikanth ‘Sri’ Srinivasan was born on February 23, 1967 at Chandigarh. He is a US Circuit Judge of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He has also lectured at Harvard Law School. In 2016, Srinivasan was considered by President Obama as a potential nominee to the Supreme Court of the US. His family moved to the US in the late 1960s when his father had a Fulbright fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley. Srinivasan earned a bachelor's degree in 1989 from Stanford University and earned a JD/MBA in 1995 from Stanford Law School and Stanford Graduate School of Business. After law school, Srinivasan worked as a law clerk for the US Supreme Court. On August 26, 2011 Srinivasan was appointed as Principal Deputy Solicitor General of the US. A final vote on his nomination was 97–0. He took the oath of office on the Bhagavad Gita and became the first federal appellate judge of South Asian descent.
Satya Narayana Nadella
Corporate
Satya Narayana Nadella was born on August 19, 1967 in Andhra Pradesh. He was appointed as CEO of Microsoft on February 4, 2014. Before this, he was Executive Vice President of Microsoft's Cloud and Enterprise group.
His father, B N Yugandher, was an IAS officer. Nadella attended the Hyderabad Public School at Begumpet and earned BE degree in electrical engineering from the Manipal Institute of Technology in 1988.
Nadella travelled to the US to study for an MS degree in Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He received it in 1990. Later, he received an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Nadella worked with Sun Microsystems as a member of its technology staff prior to joining Microsoft in 1992. At Microsoft, Nadella has led major projects.
Renu Khator
Academics
Academician Renu Khator was born on June 29, 1955 at Farrukhabad in Uttar Pradesh. She is the eighth chancellor of the University of Houston System and the 13th president of the same University. She is the first foreign-born president of the university and the second woman to hold the position. Khator is the first Bharatiya-American to lead a major research university in the US. Khator earned a bachelor's degree from the Kanpur University in 1973. She attended Purdue University and received MA in political science and a Doctor of Philosophy in political science and public administration in 1975 and 1985. In the same year, Khator joined the University of South Florida where she served in several positions. Her 22-year association with the University culminated as provost and senior vice president. She emerged as the sole finalist in 2007 for the vacant dual-position as chancellor of the University of Houston System and president of the University. Khator became the third person to hold such a dual position. Khator was appointed to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas board of directors on January 13, 2011.
Vinod Khosla
Business
Vinod Khosla was born on January 28, 1955 in Delhi. A prominent Indian-American businessman listed by Forbes magazine as a billionaire, Khosla made his early fortune as a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, where he was the founding CEO and chairman in the early 1980s. In 1982, Khosla co-founded Sun Microsystems (SUN is the acronym for the Stanford University Network) along with three Stanford classmates. Khosla served as the first chairman and CEO of Sun Microsystems from 1982 to 1984, when he left the company to become a venture capitalist. In 1987, Khosla joined the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield& Byers as a general partner. At Kleiner, Khosla became a recognised venture capitalist. He also invested in SKS Microfinance, which lends small loans to poor women in rural Bharat. He is a known supporter of the use of ethanol. In 2006, Khosla's wife Neeru co-founded the CK-12 Foundation, which aims to develop open source textbooks and lower the cost of education in America and the rest of the world.
Vivek Kundra
Banking
Technical vizard Vivek Kundra was born in Delhi on October 9, 1974. Kundra is a Bharatiya-American administrator who served as the first chief information officer of the US from March 2009 to August 2011 under President Barack Obama. He is currently the Executive Vice President of Emerging Markets for Salesforce.com and a visiting Fellow at Harvard University. He had earlier served in Washington DC Mayor Adrian Fenty's cabinet as the District's Chief Technology Officer and in Virginia Governor Tim Kaine's cabinet as Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Technology. He moved to Tanzania with his family at the age of one, when his father joined a group of professors and teachers to provide education to local residents. Kundra learned Swahili as his first language, in addition to Hindi and English. His family moved to the Washington, DC metropolitan area when he was eleven. Kundra attended college at the University of Maryland, College Park where he received a degree in Psychology. He earned a master's degree in Information Technology from University of Maryland University College. Additionally, he is a graduate of the University of Virginia's Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership.
Manoj Night Shyamalan
Cinema
Manoj Night Shyamalan was born 6 August 1970 in Mahe, Pondicherry. A seasoned Bharatiya-American film director, screenwriter, producer and occasional actor known for making movies with contemporary supernatural plots, his major films have include a supernatural thriller The Sixth Sense (1999), Unbreakable (2000), Signs (2002), The Village (2004), Lady in the Water (2006), The Happening (2008), The Last Airbender (2010), After Earth (2013) and The Visit (2015). Most of Shyamalan's commercially successful films were co-produced and released by the Walt Disney Studios' Touchstone and Hollywood film imprints. In 2008, Shyamalan was awarded the Padma Shri.
Harmit Singh Malik
Science
Researcher Harmit Singh Malik is an internationally acclaimed biology scientist. Born in Bharat, he is a member in the Division of Basic Sciences at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. He is also an Early Career Scientist of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Affiliate faculty at the University of Washington School of Medicine. He obtained his Ph.D. in biology from the University of Rochester, USA, in 1999. There, he worked with Thomas Eickbush on the evolutionary strategies of retrotransposable elements. In particular, he focused on R1 and R2 non-LTR retroposons that insert site-specifically into the ribosomal DNA of most arthropods, creating a fascinating paradigm of 'selfish DNA'. His graduate thesis also showed that in contrast to other mobile elements, non-LTR elements had been vertically inherited for hundreds of millions of years, and could be dated back to early eukaryotic evolution. Dr. Malik started his own lab at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in 2003 and has focused on researching genetic conflicts.
Vikram Malhotra
Finance
Financial genius Vikram (Vik) Malhotra is Chairman of the Americas at McKinsey and leads the company’s practices in North America and Latin America. He joined McKinsey in 1986 and has been in the New York office, where he has focused on serving clients in the financial-services sector. In the past, he led McKinsey’s East Coast Financial Institutions Practice, its North American Life Insurance Practice and its North American Personal Financial Services Practice. He co-led the company’s Emerging Markets Financial Institutions Practice. Outside McKinsey, Malhotra is active with several major non-profit organisations.
Sreenath Sree Sreenivasan
Journalism
Sreenath ‘Sree’ Sreenivasan was born in Tokyo on 28 October 1970. He was the chief digital officer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a technology journalist based in New York City. He was previously the chief digital officer of Columbia University and has served as an academic administrator and professor in the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. In 2015, he was named one of Fast Company magazine's Most Creative People of the year. He was also identified as the most influential Chief Digital Officer of 2016 by CDO Club.
Nitin Noharia
Academics
Nitin Noharia, born in Rajasthan on December 10, 1962, is the 10th and current dean of Harvard Business School. His father Kewal Nohria was a former Chairman of Crompton Greaves in India and was an influence upon Nohria's decision to embark upon a career in business. Nohria graduated from St. Columba's School in New Delhi and later earned a B.Tech degree in Chemical Engineering. He did his Ph.D. in Management from the MIT Sloan School of Management. Nohria served as co-chair of the HBS Leadership Initiative and was on the executive committee of the University's interfaculty initiative on advanced leadership. He was appointed dean of the Harvard Business School on 4 May 2010. He is the second HBS dean born outside the US.
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